


I'm the hometown hero, you're just the villain without a cause

by Guts



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-02
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 16:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guts/pseuds/Guts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he sleeps, you dont remember. If he wakes, you know because he fills the air with his cussing as he hits his toes on the table and every corner. You are angry or thirsty for a drink, you dont really care either way. You wake and dont speak, you walk and your mouth is closed. He looks at you like a stranger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm the hometown hero, you're just the villain without a cause

**Author's Note:**

> I recently got into Supernatural and I am struck by some of the beautiful fanfiction about brothers. Not the slash as much, it kind of makes me cringe. But, man!!! I hate to share the fandom with such talent, its...c...razy. Usually I write a few words about jo or cas and leave them for a week, then come back with more of a sense of direction. With this one, i had no idea what I was making myself convey and it all kind of tumbled out in a good forty minutes. I Hope, its...readable? As always, do critique and maybe write a jo/sam fanfiction in your spare time!?

He lets sam drive for a few hours and slouches into his own thoughts.  
Theres too much pressing on him, weights on his head, weights on his chest. Hes dragging himself out to sea.  
They stop at a small town café and dean knows where they are for once, its Mississippi, Missouri . one of the m’s. 

Theres something not right, something between them for the last hundred miles.

It sticks to them like muggy weather, just waiting to rain, thick and swollen in silence.

The women with the microphone wails out joni Mitchell, and alright, its karaoke night.  
She has a shaved head and an indian skirt and she is more feminine than swashbuckling Jo, than sweet, rough Ellen.  
She moves across the room with her hips and looks Dean straight in the eyes.

Hers are black. And not just the iris. 

Later, as Dean cleans the gash on his ribs from where the demon threw him into the liquor cabinet, he considers that he more or less should have known.  
Sam is sullen and moving methodically, cleaning his knife and not smelling, not looking at the murky blood on it.

Dean should not try to crack a joke. And he doesn’t, for once.

Sam does not say good night.  
Dean grunts at him, but he is silent.

Click.

Click.

Lamp off, lamp off. Deep sigh and Sam is asleep, a hulking mountain with lungs moving barely, barely up and down.

When they were twelve, ten, eleven(the years run together), they shared a basement room in an abandoned house. Bunkbeds and bad jokes about being normal kids.  
Sam was more or less still afraid of the dark, but in a very deep pit of denial that had spikes at the bottom.  
He would get up to turn the flickering light off, when he thought Dean was asleep and scramble back in the dark.

Jump high, and frantically try to catch his leg on the edge of the higher, ladderless bed. Dean would always take the opportunity to punch him in the foot, leg, dick, whatever was dangling haphazardly.

Sam would yelp and on more than one occasion, fall off and punch Dean right back and then they would be punching each other and trying to drool on the other as they noogied them ( Dean) or just punching the other repeatedly in the same spot (Sam)until they bow out and pretend you gouged them deep.

But now, there is no movement and Sam hasn’t scrambled for the light in years. He is complacent in the dark, he drinks it up, grows on it.

Dean gets up and runs his hands over his face hard, he doesn’t remember to avoid the cut and he winces. What is it in him that is not asleep?  
Is it the thoughts going, trotting around in his head?

Is it something in his heart, that is still writhing?  
Or maybe it’s the pain from where he broke his knee five years ago.  
He doesn’t know and that only makes his head walk in place faster.

This feels comfortable, warm. The rain starting up on the hotel roof, the slight drip-drip-drop of the broken faucet. It makes him feel like he can fix things.   
He goes over to Sam and punches him in the arm. 

“Wake up, shitlicker.” He says. Sam grunts and turns around. He shoves him and Sam snorts and wakes angrily.  
“What the hell? Dean?” He says in his high, ‘im pissed now’ voice.

“What the hell is going on with you, man?” Dean asks. He keeps his eyes locked on Sam’s half asleep eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dean” Sam sniffs. And ohhh, Dean could just punch him.

“Stop holding this shit in, Sam. Its bullshit and you know it.” He growls, Sam looks away and Dean keeps his eyes on him. 

Don’t turn your back on the body, it’s in the eyes. It’s in the eyes. He’s treating his brother like prey, like his dad told him to.   
“You went in without backup.” He finally spits. And like always, Dean reads the novel between the lines. More miles than he remembers away, ten or fifteen towns from this one. Demons in a house, three, four, maybe five. He went in and laid traps, got ready, threw salt on them and then broke a rib or two.   
Banged up his leg, got a stitchable cut on his lower arm.  
He looks down finally, and twists his mouth.

“Yeah…Well,” he finally says. And instead of the older brother voice, the ‘Well that’s too bad, Sammy’ tone, its sheepish and unamused.

“You got messed up, and if I had been there-if I had come, too. .” Sam lets it hang, they are too ready to absorb the others cuts, to bring the others bruises close and feel them on their own skin. 

“Well, you didn’t.” Dean says gruffly. 

Sam wasn’t pissed at him, he was pissed at himself.

“Sorry.” Sam drops lamely, letting it hang there.  
“Forgotten.”

Sam looks away, to the bedside table and he snags the whisky there. He shakily drinks from it, wipes his mouth as Dean takes it, getting up for a glass.

“Have some class, Nancy.” He sneers. Sam snorts derisively. 

Sam’s eyes are sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.  
They always have a feeling in them and Dean tires of reading it.

He’s sick of picking it out, but he’s glad that he can.   
He sighs and puts the dirty glass down, making sure Sam is watching as he wipes the mouth and neck clean dramatically before swigging from it.

“You’re one classy jerk, Dean Winchester.” Sam pokes.

“The classiest, bitch.”   
They lay back down on separate beds and Sam looks at the light, the shadows crawling into his cheeks and bones of his skull. Deans side is dark, and Sam looks at him in the eyes as he shuts his light off and throws the blanket over his head.   
“Night.” He says curtly, and Dean returns it.


End file.
